Can You Protect Your Focus Without Leaving Everyone Behind?
After the third circular exchange this week, you put your phone face down on the kitchen table and notice how hard your jaw has been working. The room is quiet, but your body is...
How to Create a Small Moment of Calm in the Middle of a Busy Day
This is one of the harder parts of a busy day to explain, especially if you are already fairly self-aware. You may know what stress feels like. You may know what usually helps. And...
When Pressure Makes the Next Step Disappear
Pressure does not always shut a person down. Often it does something quieter and harder to explain. It leaves your competence intact while interfering with your feel for what comes next. A message lands...
When the Helper Stopped Explaining
There is a moment in helping when the next true sentence is not always the next useful one. Someone is sitting across from you already overwhelmed. They are trying hard to be reasonable about...
The Cost of Leaving One Pressure Point Unresolved for 90 Days
A capable person can keep functioning around one unresolved pressure point for a surprisingly long time. That is part of what makes it so easy to misread. The work still gets done. The calendar...
How Do You Know Whether You’re Solving the Right Problem?
Sometimes the reason you keep working on the wrong problem is not that you lack insight. It is that the problem you are working on is the only one that feels safe enough to...
The Job Your Mind Thinks It Has at 2 a.m.
You are in bed. The room is quiet. The conversation is over. Nothing else is happening. And still your mind keeps returning to one small unresolved exchange as if it missed something important the...
Why Do People Repeat the Same Patterns in Completely Different Environments?
A person leaves one environment hoping the pattern will not know how to follow. They take the new job, enter the new relationship, join the new group, or begin the new season with a...
The Memory That Would Not Move
Sometimes the reason a painful memory will not move is not that you are doing anything wrong. It is that you are trying to work with something too large all at once.
When the Helpful Thing Still Feels Too Hard
Sometimes the thing that would help is not difficult to identify. That can be part of what makes the experience so confusing. Late afternoon, the room has that slightly stale feeling that comes from...